


coping on a quiet night

by tnevmucric



Category: Persona 5, Persona Series
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Open to Interpretation, POV First Person, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-23 22:40:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19160443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tnevmucric/pseuds/tnevmucric
Summary: i don't think i'm alive





	coping on a quiet night

I like how the light moves through the leaves by my window and into my eyes. Warming, facsimile peace.

"You're not busy tonight, are you?"

I don't think I'm alive.

The thought approached me in the vicious demeanor of a starved snake, striking me at my worst when my mind was already preoccupied with the struggle of keeping down a frozen meal containing more than half my daily sodium intake. _I might be dead and not even realise it._ I recall worrying about my heart, its weakness and concerning pace, the stethoscope Takemi Tae had pressed to my back while he lingered at my side—I had felt so ill and wrong within the confines of my home, the walls of my skin and my jugular and each of my bones, but even now I feel drunker and drunker on something like pure dread. The concern of Takemi had felt like a garish wave of maternal concern; genuine and perishable, it smelt of foul meat. I think I saw her last Thursday, with my hand firmly clung to his forearm as he maneuvered me down to the examination bed... but the memory is so distant, that I could have well imagined it. My heart, loud and luxurious, could have failed me weeks before that in the dungeons of Mementos or the confines of my room. Perhaps I am the rotting meat I smell.

Yet I can still feel my it, phantom-like, but increasingly present as morning progresses into night, frighteningly erratic beneath the shower head and spreading like a cold, repetitive haze while getting dressed and redressed—a blur and a twist of the same coloured haze forcing me into overdrive again. I rub my eyes, tired from my long nights and shake my head, wasted, half-torn and bleeding from an exessive, constantly reopened gash across my head, leaving my frontal lobe exposed.

"I have time. Is there something you need?"

He hangs his apron for the night and sits beside me with evident exhaust, hair outgrown into unruly curls and passive despite the frigid corpse beside him. To think, I had earlier awoke in an empty grave, sheets and blankets pressed to a fault, only to find the missing body in the company of he: my friend.

"I just wanted to check how you've been feeling", he tells me. "I've been worried since we went to Takemi's last week."

I wonder how long my body has been sitting like this, wonder how long it has been decaying—if the Thursday visit to Takemi's was real, then I must look no more than a fresh kill, and when I quickly regain my slip of consciousness, I feel the sharp outline of the gun in my jacket, winded in black and grey, pressed deep against the heart of this body: my fingers could pull taut around the handle. I almost keen forward over the counter, shoes squeaking against the foot rest of the chair and nails to my legs—I shake my head, crown daringly close to being pressed against my cool glass of water but resisting.

"I've been well", I lie. "Niijima-san has kept me busy with case work. You don't need to keep coming with me, you know. I only asked the first time because..." and in truth I'm not sure why I did ask. That coldness spreads over my head again and I blink quickly, forcing away static vision and gripping the edge of the counter for support. "You must have things of higher importance to occupy your time with, though I do appreciate you introducing me to Doctor Takemi. Her services are unmatched."

"I go because I care and want to see you feel better", he points out with a small, worried smile, knee bumping my thigh as he turns to the side, hunching over as if to get a better look. "Don't take this the wrong way, but you look awful. Is the prescription not helping?"

Perhaps I overdosed accidentally or otherwise on Takemi's prescription, I wouldn't put either option past myself. A laugh too weak leaves me and I wave him off, attempting to straighten my back again and take control of the space between us.

"I'm sure I'll be fine, these things take time."

"Have you eaten anything?"

Maternal instinct must be a running fever when people come into proximity of my porous pity. "I was planning to pick something up on the way home."

So close to his body, I am able to smell its perfume. Light, like lilacs, but too sweet that it reminds me of dense cakes during Christmas-time. I end up taking the water again and downing the whole glass, nails breaking the skin of my hip through my shirt. He stares at me like he knows, and knows what I do not know. It both unnerves and comforts me, and I will remember the look later when the transport officer wakes me from passing out on the station platform an hour from now.

"Stay by sometime", he offers.

I wake from a dream next morning ( _Sunday? Wednesday?_ ) with no appetite, no aim, and only frustration like sharp scissor points. My teeth ache, brittle and on edge as if I'd bitten ice. Blood rushes my legs when I leave the bed and with wavering steps I make my way to the kitchen, wretching into the sink and grimacing against the gritty feeling beneath my clothes. I could be dead once and reborn again— or rather, resurrected. My body cannot sustain itself in its inevitable state of decay and I am forced to live in both death and life until I drop dead twice.

"Hello?"

_"Akechi-kun?"_

A belligerent headache forces its way to the front of my brain, my hand nursing my head between knees as I slide against the lower cabinets and to the floor, grappling the phone against my shoulder and ear.

"I apologise, who is this?"

_"Dr.Takemi, we spoke yesterday."_

I pull the phone away as a cough rattles my chest. My face feels puffy and body bloated, as if air had inflated the free space in my veins and solidified in the cracking pockets around my joins.

"Yes", I croak. "Sorry. How can I help you?"

_"You've missed your scheduled appointment. I don't mind making a housecall this afternoon if-"_

"No." My wallpaper is peeling, cultured mold feasting. "No, it's quite alright. I can head over now if you have a free slot?" My headache is racing.

"Nothing until 6, so feel free to stop by."

"Thank you."

My world tilts.

"I'm worried about your teeth eroding." My jaw snaps shut and she leans over her desk to reach a pen. In the times I've seen her, she's always seemed taller than me, always reminiscent of the women in magazines kept in waiting rooms. "How's the nausea? Any blood?"

"No." No, not _now,_ I think—but _later,_ when I've stopped thinking, when I'm choking on it, _yes, there'll be blood._ Internal, or something of the sort.

It's as if the momentary animation of my decaying organs is coming to an abrupt stop, every time.

I leave the clinic tired, pressing my back against the harsh graffiti tarnishing her nameplate. My head hurts and Yongen seems prone to rain, getting off on the collective consciousness' social misery. I feel deadweight, bloody, ugly and unable to keep standing. A part of me wants to lay in the grime and be washed away—it takes me too long to realise my umbrella is absent, more than likely hanging by my doorway.

A hand catches me just as I slump further down the wall and of course— _of course_ it's him. I could almost smile, but a cough leaves my throat (something harsh and monochrome) and I hold onto his arm tightly, my heart well out of my throat and on the grime stained ground.

I feel careless as I close my eyes. I've been careless since the start, said things I shouldn't have and engaged with him in ways I knew were boundary-crossing. I feel his breath on my face and his knuckles on my forehead, I smell Leblanc, taste dust in the air. His bed feels warm, like he's just rolled out of it, and the thought burns inside me.

"You love me, don't you."

In another timeline, this could have been a tender whisper on my part—a teasing jest over dinner to coerce him into letting me choose what movie we'd go and see. Instead it is the bland truth, flat on my tongue and defiant in his eyes. He slides my shoes from my feet and I feel awfully small; he must have hung my jacket to the side as we walked in.

"Yes."

His fingers barely brush lint from my pant leg and I could snap them, feel the abrupt stop of his circulating blood and the sensation as my undead, dead again body remained a fake warm, effortlessly cooling as a picturesque night ripened through his open window with his anguished scream as melody.

I devour the suffice meal of affection he offers me for the desperate need in my psyche. No accompaniments, no seasoning: just burnt and soaking black organs, the clutter in my brain appropo to sickly honey— _I love you_ , I could imply. _More than the confines of the word allowed_ , I could answer. _Effortlessly and with an aching strain._

 _Enough_ , I could tell him. _Just enough._

"I..." My toes curl, his eyes doting and reverently attentive to the syllable leaving my lips. He coaxes me forward with an open hand and cups my chin barely, smiling with a kind, quiet mirth.

"I know", he murmurs. "I know you do, honey."

I suspect if I am dead, then he must be inhuman. Inhuman with endless answers and premonitions. _Was it the way I sucked the air through my teeth before I said anything? Is that how he knew? Or was it the way I approached him at the T.V. Station?_  It's like no distance could hold him from me, and he pretends every door I shut is a hand waving _hello_. I don't think I even love him, it would be ridiculous to even try compare the two. I know him even in death, when my corpse is as deranged as those minds I have left behind. What I have for him is so much more than love, and that tremendous ache petrifies. My own pain is abrasive and loud in his room, exuding the tight strain that tugs in the recesses of my chest to which I naively thought I kept under control but—but I am _distressed_ and a scream builds in my throat, threatenening to cut off my nerves and leave me breathless. I have lived with the choice not to share right up until this moment, and I can only hope that he takes me kindly.

"I understand", his voice wanders in, hand tight on my knee and grounding me back into this time, "how good it must have felt to do something for once, according to plan, and not question the weight of its morality... but you're not alone now, and you have a choice. You've always had a choice."

I hesitate and the feeling is so unnatural and unfamiliar that it stills my bones—his hand drawing firmer to unknot the tension.

"Death feels better than all of this", and yet it toils in my stomach and rises to my mouth— a weakened bile broth.

"How does it feel?"

Exhaustion hits me suddenly.

"Like nothing."

Sometimes I think in another life, we sit next to each other outside of a venue. We're in similar tuxedos and I hold my gloves instead of wearing them; we stare, unbashedly, and begin to dim against the polarising lights. I rush to tell him something, but the words never come. That is what we will always be destined to, even if I saw him every day forever, I think.

"Yes", he persuades proximity, "because you're alive. You're alive, Goro."

Being alive compared to encompassing death is as if my heart and I are sometimes doing the same things at different times of day, like eating or showering or sleeping. It thumps in the base of my throat, perhaps comically fast— is this mocking?

"You're alive", he repeats, and it feels better to feel the light of streetlamps warming my back when I fall forward into my own lap. Shaking, maybe. Crying, a possibility. _Alive?_ Still pending.

"Today is my birthday", I whisper.

He touches my chest.

"Happy birthday."

 _Be softer_ , he seems to be telling me, _with you._

He ambles down the hall of my beginnings and revives me every time.


End file.
